Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Litigation Matters

[Update, Friday, 1.34pm: According to WTVD-11, the latest Mangum lawyer has withdrawn from her case, citing a conflict of interest. Note, by the way, the radically different (and more accurate) way WTVD summarizes the case than that offered by the comically biased Herald-Sun. Two mentions that the Mangum allegations were false, and no bizarre insinuation that charges were dismissed because of national media coverage.]

The City of Durham has filed its response with the Supreme
Court, urging the Court not to hear the appeal filed by attorneys for the falsely accused players. The basic argument was the same that the city adopted
(successfully) before the 4th Circuit—that as long as Durham police
officers didn’t withhold information from Mike Nifong, and as long as a grand
jury came back with an indictment, even if that indictment was based on (in the
case of Sgt. Gottlieb) inaccurate testimony about Crystal Mangum’s myriad
stories, it doesn’t violate the Constitution for a city to: (1) allow an
elected prosecutor to supervise an ongoing, pre-indictment police investigation;
(2) then have its police officers work with that elected prosecutor to manufacture
evidence implicating innocent people in a crime that never occurred. As long as
the police didn’t lie and the grand jury indicted, according to Durham, there
was nothing actionable in how the city behaved.

The City of Durham: civil liberties capital of America.

On matters related to civil liberties, I have a piece up at Minding the Campus on the remarkable (and deeply disturbing) reaction of UNC administrators to the recently-passed law boosting accused students' legal rights. (Jane Stancill also obtained some jaw-dropping quotes at the N&O.) As often is the case, defenders of the academic status quo essentially prove the critics' case.

The false accuser, meanwhile, was back in the news—the Herald-Sun reports
that her latest attorney, Scott Holmes, is seeking to recuse himself from
the case, citing a conflict of interest. The precise nature of that conflict
was left very murky by Holmes; he pointed to a colleague whose client was in an
“adverse position” to Mangum.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the H-S article came in its description of
Mangum’s role in the lacrosse case: “Mangum is the woman who accused Duke
lacrosse players of raping her after they hired her to strip at their party.
After national media coverage about the case, the charges against the lacrosse
players were dismissed.”

A casual reader wouldn’t know: (a) that the lacrosse players
were declared innocent, and Mangum’s allegations were false; and (b) that the
declaration resulted not from “national media coverage” but from an attorney
general’s investigation.

At least the distinguishing of the “national media,” while
ignoring the excellent work of the N&O
and the Chronicle, makes clear that the Herald-Sun‘s coverage played no role in bringing
about the exoneration.

Speaking of Mangum, John Tucker from the Independent did a long
article on the false accuser’s stoutest defender, Justice for Nifong
Committee chairperson (and, at this point, sole member?) Sidney Harr. (The
cover art, oddly, portrays Harr as a superman carrying Lady Justice.) While Harr
is one of the strangest people to appear in the case, I doubt that before this
article appeared anyone realized just how strange Harr actually is. To quote
from Tucker’s piece, which brought to the fore a host of previously unknown items
about Harr, at least in the Triangle:

Despite
Harr’s reputation as a public gadfly and Nifong’s biggest supporter, most
people know little about the man and his motivations. It is not well-known that
after going broke in California, he bounced around with his wife, leaving a
trail of sensational lawsuits marked by paranoia. Between 1985 and 1997, Harr
was a party to at least 27 lawsuits in California, Arizona and Ohio. He sought
hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for civil rights violations,
employment discrimination and fraud.

“He
confidently moved from city to city wrecking people’s lives and careers,” said
Dwight James, a physician who runs a practice in Porterville, Calif.

It might be suggested that a man who spent years “wrecking people’s lives and
careers” is exactly the sort of character Mike Nifong deserves as
chairperson of his exoneration committee.

Tucker also managed to obtain a rare comment from the long-silent
Wahneema Lubiano, architect of the Group of 88 proclamation—which falsely
claimed official endorsement from five academic departments—that something “happened”
to Crystal Mangum. To the best of my knowledge, Lubiano’s last interview with a mainstream journalist about anything related to the
case was a highly
sympathetic one from ESPN, after which reporter John Pessah nonetheless
concluded, with extraordinarily vivid imagery, that his subject, Lubiano, “knew some would see the [Group of 88] ad as a stake
through the collective heart of the lacrosse team”

—but drove the stake anyway.

Tucker chatted with Lubiano about “issues such as race, class and privilege—ideas never fully
reckoned with during the lacrosse chaos.” Not really: it’s hard to argue that
these issues—addressed non-stop by the Duke faculty—were never fully reckoned
with in the lacrosse case, unless the argument is that those who so badly
misjudged the case were never held accountable.

In any
event, according to Tucker, here’s the new Lubiano take on the person whose
version of events she once uncritically accepted:

Mangum
symbolizes a host of uncomfortable ideas, like mental illness and social order,
according to Wahneema Lubiano, the associate chairwoman of Duke University’s
Department of African & African American Studies. “And frankly we should be
uncomfortable,” she said, “but the discomfort should take a different form than
collectively rolling our eyes.”

I’d
agree with Lubiano that we should be uncomfortable—uncomfortable about Duke
faculty members who disregarded their obligations under the Faculty Handbook and then refused to
take responsibility for their actions. (By the way: during the case itself,
neither Lubiano nor any other member of the Group of 88 ever publicly suggested,
or even hinted at, the fact that Mangum was mentally ill.)

Finally, an odd item from the article:

As is his longstanding
media policy, Nifong declined to comment for this story. He and Harr have met
only a handful of times, but there are parallels between them. Both men tried
to take on Duke University, and lost. Both were rebuked by the State Bar. Both
declared bankruptcy. Both staked their identities on fighting injustice.

As portrayed by Tucker, Harr comes across as delusional, an almost sad character: it’s entirely possible that he sees himself as a
champion of justice, and that he actually believes that Richard Brodhead’s Duke was actually part of a conspiracy to victimize, rather than lionize, Crystal
Mangum.

But Nifong—a man who broke myriad ethics rules and tried to manufacture
evidence to imprison innocent people, all in an effort to advance his political
career—cannot possibly be portrayed as someone who staked his identity on “fighting
injustice.” Moreover, Nifong never took
on “Duke University.” He took on Duke
students, a big difference. Duke University, by contrast,was one of his biggest allies. It
employed his star witness (former SANE-nurse-in-training Tara Levicy). Its
president repeatedly took actions that communicated to the world a belief in
the players’ likely guilt (such as cancelling the Georgetown game while the
players were on the field, or publicly remarking that whatever Seligmann and Finnerty
did was “bad enough). And, of course, for the critical first weeks of the case,
the public voice of Duke’s faculty was the rush-to-judgment sentiment of
Wahneema Lubiano and her 87 pedagogical allies.

I nonetheless hope people read the Tucker piece. In a case
filled with bizarre characters, Harr might well be the most bizarre—which is
saying something.

13 comments:

Anonymous
said...

While I write this Professor Allen's letter detailing ten embarrassing episodes from campuses in NC is being read on a nationaly syndicated radio show. I write to suggest that "false" should be "falsely" in the first paragraph and the word "make" should be "mask" in hte seventh paragraph.

Thanks for sharing this. I had a friend who was in a civil suit, so since we live in California, I told him to contact our local Los Angeles law firm that I worked with in the past. The delivered results for me and I know that they will do the same for my friend. You're always going to get a set of colorful characters no matter what courtroom you're in.

Yet more garbage from the Academic Left. Perhaps the main reason that people like Lubiano and other hardcore leftists take refuge in academe is that in any other sector of society (except politics -- and the Academic Left and politics are joined at the hip), their viewpoints would be recognized as delusional.

For the most part, the attempt by the Independent and Duke's faculty to try to resurrect the lacrosse story as one in which Nifong was "searching for justice" is just one more indictment of the intellectual and political climate of Durham and Duke University. Apparently, the people there are proud of being delusional.

No, they are desperate to try to fool the public into not thinking the lacrosse case was a political, race-baiting campaign event which it was. They are probably betting on their ability to charge others with delusion if they speak the truth of what the lacrosse case truly was, since now it is more about them not looking the political lying monkeys that they are.

It is odd that former Governor Purdue is currently working/studying at Duke.

She says she was so burnt out by NC politics that she needed a new outlook.

However, Duke is NC politics as far as Purdue was concerned, so why is she working/studying politics at Duke?

Also, what happened to the person from the public policy / journalism (?) department that broke into the governor's mansion when Purdue held office claiming that he was drunk and hated Christmas (because he apparently trashed the Christmas tree or something)?

As always, thank you KC, for keeping a searchlight on these dark sides of public and academic life. One no longer can distinguish between parody and the real thing in the case itself, in the legal system, in the dishonesty of the media, and in what sadly passes for intellectual and moral life in Duke's faculty and in Duke's administration.

Can you comment further on the Duke Lacrosse Team's settlement with Duke in terms of what was agreed to by Duke and by the students respectively?

How do you view the civil case so far, in terms of what the results to date mean for justice for any if they deal in any way with Durham? Is it just Durham, or the entire state of NC that holds the same opinions as Durham that were determined in this case so far, what were they specifically, and do they have a bearing on the involvement with any state employee in NC, the USA, or just Durham?

Thank you if you have the time and knowledge to answer these questions here. It might be pertinent to know these things for many (all?).

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I am from Higgins Beach, in Scarborough, Maine, six miles south of Portland. After spending five years as track announcer at Scarborough Downs, I left to study fulltime in graduate school, where my advisor was Akira Iriye. I have a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. At Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, I teach classes in 20th century US political, constitutional, and diplomatic history; in 2007-8, I was Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

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